Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in murder claim: CEN 9.26.08 p 4.

The Consistory Court of the Diocese of Exeter last week rejected a bid to exhume the hundred year old remains of a Devon man, whom it was claimed was murdered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Rodger Garrick-Steele alleged that Conan Doyle stole the plot of the Hound of the Baskervilles from Bertram Fletcher-Robinson and poisoned him to cover up the theft. He also claimed that the creator of Sherlock Holmes had engaged in an adulterous affair with Fletcher-Robinson’s wife, who helped conceal the murder.
Fletcher-Robinson was a Daily Express journalist and friend of Conan Doyle’s. He died at the age of 36 from typhoid fever and peritonitis on Jan 21, 1907 following a trip to Paris, and was buried at St. Andrew’s Church in Ipplepen.

Garrick-Steele had filed a petition with the church court to exhume the body to test it for poison.

However, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the chancellor of the ecclesiastical court, dismissed Garrick-Steele’s claims of murder, adultery, conspiracy, plagiarism, and fraud.

In his ruling, Sir Andrew held “This court has been driven to the conclusion that it cannot place any reliance on as assertion made by [Garrick-Steele] which is not backed up by an independent piece of evidence or source. On the basis of the material that he has placed before this court he appears to be a totally unreliable historian.”